Free ‘Blue Ocean Strategy for Nonprofits’ seminar offered Jan. 13

The Center for Nonprofit Management will hold a free seminar – “Blue Ocean Strategy for Nonprofits” – on Wednesday, Jan. 13, on the university’s Minneapolis campus. The seminar will run from 9 to 11:30 a.m.

Dr. John McVea

Blue Ocean Strategy is one of the most important developments in business strategy in the last 20 years. First developed by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in their book Blue Ocean Strategy: Creating Blue Oceans, this approach takes the concept of strategy back to its roots in creative, innovative thinking, and away from the idea of planning or future prediction.

The Blue Ocean approach asks organizations to turn away from obsessing about the competition, benchmarking and copying best practices; instead, it asks organizations to turn toward the customers or clients and ask, “What haven’t they seen? What isn’t being done for them? What could we do that no one has done before?” Instead of focusing on replication, efficiency or implementation, Blue Ocean Strategy asks organizations to focus on developing innovative new services that enrich lives in a way that no one else has yet thought of.

In the second of three free seminars designed to respond to nonprofit needs, John McVea, Ph.D., will take participants through this revolutionary approach to strategy development. From this seminar, participants will be able to use Blue Ocean concepts to move from strategizing within existing structures and boundaries to learning how to re-create new organizational value for their clients and communities.

McVea is an assistant professor in the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas. His academic specialties are entrepreneurial strategy, managerial decision making and business ethics. He comes from the north of Ireland and has worked extensively in countries in Europe and in the Americas. McVea has undergraduate degrees in engineering (B.Sc.) and economics (B.Com.) from the University of Birmingham in England, and earned an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. in management at the Darden School at the University of Virginia. He has had several publications and book chapters published in the areas of both entrepreneurial strategy and business ethics.

For more information or to register for this program, visit the center’s Web site or call (651) 962-4245.